NEWPORT, RI.- The Redwood Library & Athenaeum announces the opening of Recreation Myths, Jackie Gendel’s first museum exhibition, comprising seventeen paintings from the past two decades. The exhibition, titled by the artist, refers to the possibilities of painting as a medium with which to think through creation, self-creation, and the mediation of self in contemporary culture.

In these paintings, Gendel asks in different ways, and from different angles: “Is one free to create the self, or is one always scaffolded?” The architectural metaphor which structures her language equally shapes her work, which unfolds in the shadows of the avant-garde city, in an interim space between inside and outside, private and public. For Gendel, the notion of “creation myths” refers less to ancient or archetypal cultural narratives than to the ideal of self-creation that runs from Socrates to the “self-made” subject of American democracy. If Gendel’s title implies that private self-creation is a myth, it may be because our choices, if not our actual selves, are largely determined by public “scaffoldings” that are often opaque to us. If so, how much remains for an individual to create, or to recreate?

Here, through painting, a medium of both creation and obliteration, layering and erasure, Gendel revisits key early twentieth-century modernist motifs and gambits as she works through the place of women in the paintings of Post-Impressionists like Marie Laurencin, Ernst Kirchner, Francis Picabia, Pierre Bonnard, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Leger, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Women, the iconic subject of the period, lounge on the grass, and pose theatrically. But they also step out into the public sphere, often beneath the silhouette of Classical archways. Or the framing arch toggles ninety degrees, as in The Archers, a signal work in the exhibition, where women take aim as architects of their own fate.

As exhibition curator Leora Maltz-Leca notes: “Jackie Gendel is one of the most talented painters working today, and it is a rare pleasure to exhibit her work in an institutional setting, especially one as embedded in Neoclassicism and its mythologies as the Redwood. Gendel’s work revisits the gendered histories of art, architecture and the city in forceful and inventive paintings that assert the unrivaled power and pleasure of formal strategies long conceived as "’feminine.’"

In Gendel’s work, her depicted daughters of modernism sport the flamboyant color and rowdy pattern of the iconic paintings of the early teens and twenties. Yet these womens’ exaggerated poses underscore the artificiality of their role playing. This overt theatricality returns us to Gendel’s structuring question around the possibilities of making, unmaking, and re-creating the self; And ultimately, to the inquiry into how fashioning the self might be imagined through the language of paint. Redwood Executive Director Benedict Leca observes: “The thematic of self-fashioning is particularly pertinent in the context of the Redwood, which is largely a portrait gallery, suggesting once again how contemporary art can illuminate continuities and filiations across radically disparate eras.”

The paintings in Recreation Myths are installed upon Steps, Gendel’s wall covering in rose, blush and camel commissioned by Peg Norris for Schumacher. The nine-foot wallpaper repeats multiple times across the expanse of the Redwood’s Van Alen gallery, creating a rhythmic and dynamic ground for the paintings. In Steps, the abstracted forms of women ascend and descend stairs, emerging and receding from the contours of the urban fabric, their triangular skirts echoing Classical pediments, and their limbs reiterating post and lintels. As their forms zigzag across the walls, their rise and fall suggests the varied, uneven histories and fortunes of women in the painted surfaces and art histories of the avant-garde city.

Organized by the Redwood Library and Athenaeum’s Redwood Contemporary Arts Initiative’s (RCAI) founder and curator Dr. Leora Maltz-Leca, in close collaboration with Jackie Gendel, the presentation will be on view on the Redwood’s Van Alan gallery until December 31, 2025.